The alarm and resentment set up by his act counted for much in stirring the English people three years later to resist their Romanizing king James II, who, had he gone his way more prudently, might have done much to rehabilitate Catholicism in virtue of the fanatical devotion to the throne already developed by the reaction against the Puritan rebellion. On the other hand, the tyrannous policy which had kept Ireland Catholic, by identifying Protestantism with oppression, and Catholicism with the national memories, was cruelly carried on by England, with the result of maintaining a perpetual division between the two countries, and preparing a great source of Catholic population for the United States in a later age. The profound decivilization inflicted on Ireland by Protestant England is probably the greatest of the social and political evils resulting from the Reformation; but the persecution of dissenters in England, and the more savage dragooning of Presbyterians in Scotland under Charles II and James II (which had an excuse in the aggressive intolerance of the Covenanters) must go to the same account. Nowhere, not even in Protestant Switzerland--save in the case of Zurich, well led by Zwingli, and in that of the Grisons, where Catholics and Protestants agreed to abolish feudal abuses--did the Reformation work social betterment for the common people. In England the tyranny of the Protestant nobles under Edward VI was both corrupt and cruel; and the Norfolk rising of 1549 was as savagely suppressed as that of Wat Tyler had been in Catholic times. In the processes by which Protestantism lost ground, as in those by which Catholicism counteracted its own successes, there was a considerable play of intellectual forces, which we shall consider apart. But though the economic, the political, and the intellectual forces always interact, the two former have had a potency which has thus far been little acknowledged. It is essential to realize that they have affected the movement of thought more than they have been affected by it; and above all that they, and not the imaginary bias of race, have determined the total fortunes of the Reformation. § 4. Intellectual Results The intellectual reactions set up by the Reformation were complex, and on some sides apparently contradictory. Some populations, and in general the populace of the countries which remained Protestant, were made collectively more fanatical than they had been under Catholicism, even as Catholicism itself became for a time more strenuous under the stress of the conflict; but, on the other hand, there grew up on the intellectual border of Protestantism forms of heresy which outraged its majority; and within the political sphere of Catholicism there came a new growth of skepticism. All these varying results can be traced to the initial shock of the revolt against Rome.